司法實務的詭辯陰影 Sophist skills behind the court HoonTing

司法實務的詭辯陰影  Sophist skills behind the court    HoonTing

The cause and effect, or the causality, is out of the question when a person throws a stone at the glass and breaks it. 

But, can a person defends himself "not guilty" by saying: the glass is intact when the stone is in my hand; the glass is intact when the stone is in the air; when the stone touches the glass and break it, the stone is not in my hand? 

Yes, this is a famous example, which signifies the Sophist skill: breaking up the whole linkages of cause and effect by the rhetoric skill. 

Another notable argument is that a marathon runner can never catch up with a turtle.

By arbitrarily breaking up the flow of cause and effect, Sophists' arguments often challenge people's common sense. 

Not only in ancient Greek, but the skill can also be found in major traditions.  Using similar skill, the Buddhist bodhisattva Nāgārjuna taught disciples the “emptiness,” one of the fundamental assertions of Mahāyāna Buddhism. 

Recently, a district judge ruled that a defendant who was sued to kill a policeman in front of witnesses was innocent.  The court decision is neither cold-blooded nor illegal.  Rather, something goes wrong inside our judiciary practice. 

The legal training, which highlights the short and direct causes and effect linkage only, must be blamed. 

A Sophist's skill is in the court decision: “the defendant had a mental disorder, so he was not able to acknowledge his behavior correctly.” 

Despite calculated murder, almost all the defendants who are sued murder were driven crazy shortly before he or she killed.

Besides the mess situations and habitual behaviors, which trigger sudden disorder mentality, “stop taking medicines” is a cause. 

The doctor of the detention center assumed that the defendant was “clearly enough a patient of Schizophrenia,” based on the symptoms.  Strict as the court process may be, such as the linkage of causes and effects a judge may follow in making his decisions, we would like to ask a simple question: one thing existed months ago, it exists months after? 

The court also invited a Psychiatrist doctor from a Veteran Hospital nearby to assist.  The doctor concluded, “the suspect was in Dyslexia disorder when he killed the policeman, …he can nor recognize if his behavior is legal or not.”

 

However, the suspect saw a Psychiatrist in 2001 and confirmed the Dyslexia in 2010.  He took medicines but did not go to the hospital since 2016. 

The Court ruled that the defendant “felt better” then stopped taking medicines, ignoring the linkage between discontinuing the medicines and the killing, and overlooked the suspect bought knives before the killing. 

Before he stopped seeing doctors and ceasing to take medicines, the defendant must be mentally normal.  His brain and awareness must be normal enough to understand the result of not taking medicines.  The question is: how does the court break up the early relations of cause and effect, which spanning for many years, while decides the incident in just a few minutes? 

Ignoring the whole and yearly scenario, the court ruled the case by direct and strict cause and effect principle, which made apparent injustice.  The practices of the arbitration court and the Common Law countries, which utilize the equity rules as complementary factors outside the systems of the cold strict legal clauses, enrich the justice of the court decision. 

Since the court accepted the comment from the Psychiatrist doctor “the defendant should take medicines for a lifetime,” and “the defendant must be treated in a proper facility,” it needed to rule that the defendant should be put in a proper mental hospital for a lifetime, not for five short years. 

We call for the court and all the judges, not to rule cases by breaking up the whole relations of the cause and effect arbitrarily.

 

 

嘉義地方法院108年度重訴字第6號，新聞稿